on the inter-connectedness of B2B funnels and marketing automation systems

Last Thursday I attended a tweet chat on the #MarTechChat “channel”, on the topic of Dirty Data. Quite a few nuggets of wisdom were shared, and I collected some of ‘em here, because I’m such a good person. Also to get the image of Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze out of my mind’s eye and plant it in yours.

That’s… too much… for my back..

Now, in case you’re not familiar with the concept of a ‘tweet chat’, it’s an epilepsy-inducing form of online engagement in real-time, where you follow a flood of posts submitted by people with agendas, all tagged with a pre-agreed hashtag. The host of the tweet chat, likely with the help of a lot of Ritalin, guides the discussion by posting questions and tagging them with the prefix Q1, Q2, etc. Then everybody attempts to answer using the prefix A1, A2 etc. It’s all lots of fun and very educating, but only if you have good people like me who are willing, after the fact, to collect the best tidbits of 140-character wisdom and share it in a friendlier, far less chaotic format, like here.[Continue reading]

I'll start with an admission: I'm not a huge Hubspot fan. I've been using it alongside similar software like Marketo and Pardot, and found it lacking in comparison, especially with regards to automation power, and flexibility. My biggest gripe with … [Continue reading]

Gone are the days when experts could sit comfortably in the knowledge that they knew all there was to know about their given field. Over-specialization in marketing has gone from being a blessing to a curse, and it’s getting worse. Marketers are … [Continue reading]

I found myself being asked this question more than once just this week, which means, according to the hallowed rules of content marketing, that it should make for a great blog post topic. So I sat down in attempt to answer it. I'll be making two … [Continue reading]

I recently delivered a marketing automation best practices session to a veteran team of B2B marketers. While some of the ideas I've shared got traction with the team, at the end of the session, one of the managers spoke up and provided the feedback … [Continue reading]

By skipping opt-in tactics, many B2B marketers are missing out on a powerful database growth strategy
Wake a good B2B online marketer in the middle of the night, and in no time they'll be spewing traffic metrics, conversion rates and channel … [Continue reading]

Is there a better sign that a technology has reached mainstream status than an airport sign?!
P.S. I hope the nice people at Oracle Eloqua are aware of the fact that with signs like this, in prime locations such as London Heathrow airport, they … [Continue reading]

Once in a while some research comes out talking about marketing automation adoption, success indicators, and the challenges that marketers face in using these systems to their full advantage. Below is the VentureBeat report chart that highlights the … [Continue reading]

The Website <-> Marketing Automation Interface is Broken
Almost all marketing automation tools include the option to track user behaviour. The data flow is straightforward and unidirectional - the web tracker feeds data to the marketing system … [Continue reading]